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Struck

I often wonder if there was something I missed, if the thunder and lightning said something I couldn’t understand.

I Got You

“I’m your brother,” the man says, then swallows. He is tall and burly with deep-set blue eyes and thinning hair. He wipes his nose on his flannel sleeve and forks some coleslaw from a plastic container.

The Cat Who Woke Me Up

The hierarchy that places humans above cats has broken down. I know, in a way I once didn’t, that cats and dogs and birds and bees and every living creature are conscious in a way that’s too hard for most of us to acknowledge. We’re all a bunch of narcissists who imagine that no life-form is quite as appealing as this one we call human. We’re unable to share the stage unless the animals are the supporting players.

Radar and Revelation

Jeffrey J. Kripal on Archiving the Impossible

I don’t interpret UFO phenomena literally. I can’t help but see the moral anxiety and end-of-the-world panic expressed by them. But that doesn’t mean I think these encounters don’t happen.

Reincarnation

Maybe they would come back as cats and lie on sunny windowsills, not touching but close enough to hear each other breathing, to recognize the shift in cadence marking the slip into sleep. Maybe he’d lick his paws while she slept—though maybe he wouldn’t be a he and she wouldn’t be a she, and it wouldn’t matter.

Sunbeams

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust—ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Old Souls

Jim Tucker on Children’s Memories of Past Lives

Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?

Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.

Local Haunts

Colin Dickey On Place And Meaning In Ghost Stories

I think every place is haunted to one degree or another. And there will always be people who have a feeling when they visit a place, or believers who will say that they’ve seen something.

The Psychic Is In

Being exposed to psychics at such a young age was like being raised Catholic or vegetarian: you continue living out these belief systems even after they no longer serve you.